F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (24 September 1896-21 December 1940) was an American fiction writer whose works came to define the zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties. A member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s, he was best known for his book The Great Gatsby.

Biography
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1896. The family moved fairly often as his father lost and gained jobs. His father was descended from an old Southern family that included Francis Scott Key, but their money had long since gone, leaving his father to make a living as a Procter and Gamble salesman. His mother was the daughter of Irish immigrants who had made a fortune in the grocery business, and his mother was devoted to him. Fitzgerald was aware that the family lived on the best fringe of society, and he was very conscious of social standing, "crawling before kitchen maids and insulting the great" as a youth. Fitzgerald was sent to the Catholic prep school Newman Academy (known to get its students into Ivy League schools) in Hackensack, New Jersey, where he aimed to become popular as a football player, but he instead became a drinker.

Fitzgerald was admitted to Princeton in 1913, but he once again set popularity as his major goal, joining The Triangle Club drama society, a route to social acceptance. He devoted so much energy to his activities that he ignored his classes and was placed on academic probation and returned home for a year. He returned to Princeton, but was commissioned into the US Army in the fall of his senior year. The 11 November 1918 armistice occurred before he could leave for Europe to fight in World War I, and he was upset about his inability to experience such a major event in his generation's lives. He met the 18-year-old Zelda Sayre while he was in Alabama, and she was extremely popular. Fitzgerald's heavy drinking continued in the army,and, while he was in the military, he worked on a novel which he had begun in college: he sent a draft of The Romantic Egotist to Scribner's, who rejected it.

After his discharge from the army, Fitzgerald and Zelda had a tentative engagement, and he had to prove that he could make a good living for her before they could marry. He went to New York and got a job in an advertising firm in an attempt to prove himself. Between April and June of 1919, he wrote 19 stories and collected 122 rejection slips, but he finally had a story accepted by Smart Set Magazine that June. Zelda broke off the engagement, as she grew tired of waiting, and Fitzgerald returned to Minnesota to continue work on his novel. He renamed The Romantic Egotist to This Side of Paradise, which was published in 1920, becoming a sensation. Fitzgerald's friend and crtitic Edmund Wilson said that it was one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published, counting over 100 misspellings in the book. The novel dealt with the sexual and drinking behavior of college students, and it was an enormous success, as he had been the first to document this new generation. In April 1920, he and Zelda Sayre were married, and they became "society's darlings" and engaged in all kinds of wild behavior in New York such as latching the hotel elevator to their floor (so that they could use it whenever they needed it) and putting guests' pocketbooks into a pot of spaghetti sauce at a party in Long Island. They spent all of the money Scott had earned form the book.

To escape some of the commotion of their New York life, the couple went to Europe. James Joyce noted that Fitzgerald must be "mad", and that he was afraid that he would do himself some injury. Fitzgerald's second book, The Beautiful and the Damned, was published in 1922 to mixed reviews, but he had already spent the advance for the book. That same year, his daughter (his only child) was born. He published Tales of the Jazz Age that same year as well, but he continued to spend wildly on expensive parties and heavy drinking. In 1924, he began writing The Great Gatsby in France, and he based the character of Jay Gatsby on a millionaire bootlegger he had known on Long Island. The novel was published in 1925. His publisher wired him, saying that, while it had excellent reviews, it would have doubtful sales; it wound up being his least-profitable book, although now his most famous. In debt to his publisher, Fitzgerald and his wife nevertheless continued their extravagant lifestyle, having "a thousand parties and no work". In 1930, Zelda experienced the first of several breakdowns, and she was eventually hospitalized in Baltimore; from this point on, she had very few visits home. Zelda's illness deepened and Fitzgerald's market declined as the 1920s ended, and he wrote Tender is the Night in 1934 and The Crack-up essays in 1935, although neither of the works found a real audience. Fitzgerald got a job as a screenwriter with MGM, supporting Zelda and paying off a large debt. He wrote to his publisher in 1940, telling him that he wished that he was in print, and that he wished that his work would have its chance. In 1939, he began his novel The Last Tycoon, but he died before the novel was completed, and it was published a year after his death. He died at the age of 44 from a heart attack, and his wife died eight years later.